‘SNL’ Finally Gets to the Bottom of the Patriots Football Scandal

The two weeks between the NFL division championships and the Super Bowl are a notoriously slow period for sports news, so it’s no wonder that “deflategate” has gone from being a strange little conspiracy tale to a national scandal that has dominated major news cycles. Did anyone expect ‘SNL’ to not get in on something so, well, dumb?

Like so many ‘SNL’ sketches, this one takes the form of a press conference, with New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick (Beck Bennett) answering questions about whether or not his team deliberately deflated footballs in their game against the Colts. Bennett plays Belichick as a ruthless, ice cold maniac who has no time for honesty of any kind, so he quickly exits to make way for quarterback Tom Brady (Taran Killam). Brady also proves totally useless, but mainly because he’s a little too slow-witted to actually engage with the average person. It’s not one of Killam’s best impersonations, but it’s certainly amusing.

The sketch ultimately descends into a parody of ‘A Few Good Men’ (yes, someone screams “You can’t handle the truth!”), with the real culprit behind the entire affair revealed on live television. “Based on real news” sketches like this tend to do one of two things: they either provide satirical commentary on an event that desperately needs to be examined, or they expose how silly and pointless something really, truly is. This sketch is definitely the latter.